Food banks being used by 100,000 Londoners to feed their families, reports shows

More than 100,000 Londoners, one in three of whom are children, are using food banks, a report has revealed.

Almost a million adults and children across the UK have received emergency food supplies in the past year, a "shocking" rise of 163 per cent on the previous 12 months amid rising living costs, low pay and welfare problems, the figures show.

The Trussell Trust, a non-governmental organisation which co-ordinates a nationwide network of food banks, said rising numbers were turning to them because their incomes are "squeezed", despite signs of an economic recovery.

A record of more than 913,000 Britons received three days' emergency food in the last year, with over half blaming benefit delays or changes.

Earlier this year, another report suggested that the number of visits to London's food banks had quadrupled in just two years.

About 63,000 trips were made by people living across the capital in the first nine months of the current financial year.

By contrast in 2011-12, there were just 12,839 visits to Trussell Trust food banks.

Alison Palmer, a volunteer at the Wimbledon Food Bank in south London, said the problem had become a "crisis".

She told London Live: "I think it is a crisis. I do not think people use food banks unless they are hungry and they have not got any food to feed their children.

"The food that we give are crisis foods, so they get basics like beans, pasta, tuna - things that will get them going.

"It is not something that you would come and eat if you didn't need to do it."

She continued: "With our three days of food, we give them a little bit of hope that the other things going on in their lives they'll be able to sort out and turn around."

The Trussell Trust's chairman Chris Mould said: "That 900,000 people have received three days' food from a food bank - close to triple the numbers helped last year - is shocking in 21st-century Britain.

"But, perhaps most worrying of all, this figure is just the tip of the iceberg of UK food poverty. It doesn't include those helped by other emergency food providers, those living in towns where there is no food bank, people who are too ashamed to seek help or the large number of people who are only just coping by eating less and buying cheap food."